Whatever Works: One Loves It, One Hates It!

Vanity Fair’s Frank DiGiacomo and Bruce Handy are both Manhattan-dwelling movie buffs with long histories of writing about Hollywood. What could they have to disagree about when it comes to the latest Woody Allen movie? As it turns out, plenty.

__From: Frank DiGiacomo

To: Bruce Handy

Subject: Whatever Works__

Hey, Bruce. I know you’re a big Woody Allen fan and was wondering if you saw his new picture Whatever Works? It’s the first Allen picture that has really resonated with me in a long time. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona or Match Point, it’s that the hallmarks of Allen’s work that first appealed to me in Take The Money and Run, Annie Hall,and Broadway Danny Rose have not been as prevalent in his more recent films. For one thing, I go to see his movies hoping to laugh my ass off, and that hasn’t happened in a while—at least until I saw Whatever Works.

You know all those media reports that kept referring to Scarlett Johansson as Woody’s muse a year or so back? Well, they were wrong. It’s Larry David. Whatever Works is one of those Allen movies like Celebrity, in which the lead actor is essentially playing the Woodman’s doppelganger, but instead of doing what Kenneth Branagh did in that film and painfully imitating Allen, David does his own thing. Yes, he resembles the Larry David character he plays in his HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there are subtle differences, and, more importantly, he infuses Allen’s comic material with a vigor and bite that it’s lacked in recent years.If you haven’t seen the movie, I should tell you the plot: David plays the aptly named Boris Yellnikoff, an accomplished physicist who, after having horrible nightmares about dying (cue Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”), wakes up in his beautiful Upper East Side apartment with his beautiful trophy wife and realizes that he is very unhappy. He attempts suicide but fails and ends up chucking everything except his obsessive-compulsive disorder and moving to the Lower East Side. There, he teaches chess to children, but mostly berates them as “idiots,” his label for much of humanity. He also washes his hands repeatedly while singing “Happy Birthday” to himself. Twice.

Life gives Boris lemons and he manages to make urine out of them, until he encounters Melodie, played beautifully by Evan Rachel Wood, who is as uneducated, naïve, and beautiful as Boris is intelligent, crotchety, and gnarled. A May-December romance follows in a post-Wall-Street-meltdown New York, emphasis on the Lower East Side.

Allen has said that his philosophy has remained consistent over the years, but I think that his humor about his philosophy has evolved into something more cynical and curmudgeonly, particularly since he emerged from L’Affaire Soon-Yi. But like a teenager who develops pecs and facial hair before his voice changes, the tough, sinewy musculature of Allen’s comedy no longer jibes with his nebbishy and nasal voice, which is why choosing Larry David to pinch hit for him proves to be a smart idea. David is the Montecore of comedy, and the first actor in a long time to present Allen’s material in a way that pays big dividends.

__From: Bruce Handy

To: Frank DiGiacomo

Subject: Re: Whatever Works__

Hi Frank. Guess what? I have seen Whatever Works.

I so wanted to like it because, as you know, I’m always rooting for Woody—I’m a completist, I’ve stuck with him through Manhattan Murder Mystery and Curse of the Jade Scorpion and even Hollywood Ending (not that I liked those films, but unlike most people I saw them, and I still get excited when the white on black type face comes up on screen and the soundtrack cues some old scratchy Ellington song or whatever)—and I’m also a big fan of Larry David’s. So of course I was thrilled and intrigued to hear they were working together: one (or at least I) thinks of them as being from different comedy generations (there’s a 12-year age difference: Allen was born in 1935, David in 1947, making him an early boomer), and yet of course, they’re obviously sympatico on many levels, being old and cranky and misanthropic; both also tend to write themselves as the smartest guy in the room, which isn’t the easiest perch to launch comedy from. Their differences are interesting too, with a strong streak of moralism underscoring Allen’s films, even, or especially, the funny ones, while David’s work pushes the contemporary comedy of manners to an almost abstract and often mortifying extreme.

Anyway, I was keen to see the movie and find out whether the two would click together. But here, alas, we must part ways. I found Whatever Works painful. To my taste, David never got the hang of Allen’s comedy rhythms, which can be straight-jacketing. You’re right that he didn’t do an imitation a la Kenneth Brannagh in Celebrity, or John Cusak in Bullets Over Broadway, but I felt like he never found a rhythm of his own, that he was stranded in a no man’s land between playing himself and playing Woody; jokes that would have worked O.K. for Allen fell flat on David’s tongue. I think the surrogate Woody who navigated Allen’s one-liners best was actually Will Ferrell in Melinda and Melinda, who was able to put his own peculiar top spin on Allen’s dialogue but still make the jokes work. (I told you I’m a completist.)

My real problem with the movie was the older-man-younger-woman theme, which has never been one of my favorite Woody motifs, even before it gained a real-life parallel. (Take Manhattan: a great film, but the Mariel Hemingway relationship is creepy and condescending, and I don’t just say that as a father of an almost teenage daughter.) Going back to Alvy and Annie, the romances in Allen’s films often have a teacher-pupil quality, too, and in Whatever Works we get that as well as the December-May thing. But here, Allen doesn’t even bother to make the relationship between David’s and Evan Rachel Woods’s characters credible. Aside from her being hot, the attraction makes no sense: She’s a moron and he’s hateful.

The film feels more like a fable than anything; if I remember correctly David first finds Wood hiding behind a dumpster or under a staircase, like someone finding a magic lamp in a fairy tale. A fable, O.K., but then it should be magical or charming or at least illustrative. I know the film had a point, but for Allen it’s a retread: life is awful, horrible, pointless, etc., but we can take solace in the pleasures it provides, whether that’s a Louis Armstrong solo, a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers dance, knocking up Dianne Wiest, playing the clarinet—whatever works, as they say. Fucking Evan Rachel Wood: I guess that works too, but saying so is not a great insight.

I was intrigued that you didn’t like Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona that much. For me, those films had a vigor and seeming discipline that’s been missing from a lot of Allen’s work of the past two decades. On the other hand, I was disheartened when I recently caught 20 minutes of Love and Death on cable. It’s a film I’ve always loved, but this go-round I found it schticky, and self-congratulating in its literary and intellectual references. I fear that maybe Allen’s early films haven’t aged well, or that enough time has passed to make them feel awkward and dated without enough time passing to let us appreciate them in their historical context. But the fact that this artist can still make a Match Point or Vicky Christina Barcelona, that he can still grow and show new colors, is what keeps me coming back. I guess I need the eggs, as someone once said.

And so, out of respect for both you and Allen, I’ll give you the last word.

__From: Frank DiGiacomo

To: Bruce Handy

Subject: RE: Whatever Works__

Gee, Bruce, I wish you weren’t so blasé on this topic.

I guess I should start by saying that, although I am a fan of Allen’s films, I’m hardly a completist. As much as I respect his work ethic, he lost me for much of the 90s because, I think, his 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors was such a masterpiece that his follow-up, Alice, and a number of his subsequent pictures didn’t measure up or were marred by irritating performances. (For instance, I thought Celebrity made a lot of very smart observations about the subject, but I can’t watch it now because of Branagh.)

I don’t think I made it very clear in my last dispatch, but of the Allen films I’ve seen since 1990, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point registered most with me. (I somehow missed Melinda and Melinda,even though I’m a huge Ferrell fan.) But when you say that the point of Whatever Works is a retread, I would argue that Allen has been reworking a handful of big ideas and themes over much of his career. I find that to be the case with many of my favorite artists, from Martin Scorsese to Bruce Springsteen. They pick their topics and work them from different angles. One of the reasons I liked Match Point so much was that it reminded me of Crimes and Misdemeanors right down to its uncompromising, unhappy ending, but I also though it stood on its own. And though I concur thatVicky Cristina Barcelona was an example of Allen showing “new colors,” as you put it, the message I derived from it was not that different from that of Allen’s new film.

That said, I also agree with you—at least in principle—that there are aspects of Whatever Works that seem facile. Allen told The New York Observer that he originally wrote this script in the 70s, and though the high acidity level of the humor feels to me like latter-day Woody, I suspect that’s why some of the subplots play like they were written at the bar of Maxwell’s Plum. The scenes that really had me cringing were the ones in which a married minor character—I don’t want to spoil the plot—realizes he’s homosexual after sharing a couple of drinks and a recurring dream about a high-school football teammate with another gay man.

But I liked the movie mainly for the reasons that you didn’t: David’s and Wood’s performances, as well as the dynamics of their May-December relationship. I had seen Wood in The Wrestler shortly before seeing Whatever Works, and was impressed that there was no overlap in her performances. I found her sweetness and her imperviousness to David’s barbs beguiling and convincing. I don’t think Melodie is a moron either. Certainly she’s naïve and a blank slate, as well as someone who has been schooled in the willful ignorance of religion, but by the end of the film it’s clear she has absorbed some of David’s wisdom without also taking on the burden of his bitterness or becoming a slave to him. I should add that perhaps it was easier for me to suspend disbelief because I hail from the Midwest, where you can find a surprising number of people who think that Adam and Eve were historic figures and not literary devices.

As for David, I can already hear the critics grousing that he is merely aping his Curb Your Enthusiasm character in Whatever Works. I disagree. For one thing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear shorts on his HBO series—at least not ones as pitiful as the bedraggled Madras jams he limps around in in the film. (We used to call actors brave for showing their penises in films. David should be lauded for baring his pale, hairy spindlesticks.) Seriously, though, for someone who has stayed true to the “no hugs, no learning” rule of comedy that was the mantra for his first big success, Seinfeld, David does something highly uncharacteristic in Whatever Works. He grows, and he softens. I love David’s comedy and have seen every episode of his HBO show, and I would argue that at the beginning of Allen’s film, he’s even more insufferable than the character he plays on TV. When he broke the fourth wall for the first time in Whatever Works to deliver what is both the film’s title and its central idea, he exuded a smug coldness that startled me. But by the end of the picture, when he turned to the audience one last time, “whatever works” had come to mean something entirely different—something bittersweet but redemptive and romantic.

Whatever the similarities between David’s and Allen’s respective comedy styles, only in Woody’s worldview does love, however brief, transcend comedy, but in Whatever Works, it’s up to David to sell that idea. And he does.

Happily, Allen’s romantic streak extends to the film’s depiction of New York, something Allen does remarkably well but hasn’t done for a while. In addition to some amazing sets—I would love to know where they found the Lower East Side apartment where David lives—part of the message of Whatever Works is that people who can’t figure themselves out anywhere else can figure themselves out in New York. I know in my heart that that much is true.

You didn’t think Whatever Works worked as a fable, but what about as a memory? (David’s character is, after all, recounting the story to the audience.) Over the course of time, memories become distortions of actual events: the details and complexities fade; we tend to make ourselves look smarter, more appealing, and, if the story calls for it, tougher and even meaner than we actually are.

The truth takes on a heightened, glossy sheen—just like it does in the movies.